Boston Fed chief to head AmexBoston Federal Reserve...

BUSINESS DIGEST

Boston Federal Reserve President Richard Syron, a rising star at the central bank, said yesterday he's resigning to become chairman of the American Stock Exchange.

Mr. Syron, 50, was a member last year of the Fed's policy-making Open Market Committee, which makes decisions that influence the direction of interest rates in the economy. He served as president of the Boston Fed for the last five years.

Mr. Syron replaces James R. Jones, a former Oklahoma congressman who joined the Clinton administration as ambassador to Mexico.

AAI Corp. wins military contract

Cockeysville-based AAI Corp. has been awarded a $14 million Air Force contract to design and develop a simulated trainer system that will be used to teach military personnel how to maintain the radar sensors and computer equipment used in the Joint STARS radar planes.

Built by Grumman Corp., JSTARS, as the program is commonly called, is an airborne radar system used to detect and track troop and equipment movements on the ground.

Capital Bankshares, which has four branches and $58.2 million in assets, also has granted Washington Federal a warrant to buy 26,600 shares of Capital at $19.75 a share. The deal is subject to approval from Capital's stockholders and from regulators.

Nintendo plans new cartridges

In a surprise announcement, Nintendo, the Japanese video game maker, said yesterday that it would avoid the CD-ROM market and instead base its next generation of video games on solid-state copmputer cartridges.

Other manufacturers, such as 3DO, Sony and Sega, are designing systems that play CD-ROM discs - computer compact discs with read-only memory that can store more than 500 million characters of information.

Data retrieval is slower than with existing solid-state cartridges.

Sales of U.S. PCs rise in Japan

Sales of U.S. personal computers in Japan rose sharply last year, with Apple Computer Inc. taking the No. 2 spot after a 75 percent surge in shipments, a market research firm reported yesterday.